ABSTRACT
When analyzing ancient ideas, the historian of thought will have to rely largely on the written artifacts from bygone times. A common scholarly approach here is to single out individual concepts and draw conclusions about the thought of a certain text, which is sometimes equated with an individual thinker of the past. In this scenario, the ideas put forward in the written artifacts—or by imagined “individual thinkers”—are commonly reconstructed by isolating individual sentences from these texts; hypotheses about the influence of individual thinkers (or texts) on other thinkers (or texts) are set up, and intellectual lineages are (re)constructed in a diachronic fashion. 2
